where i can do no harm
by The Lady Avaritia
Summary: "You promised to help us find our place. To give us a home. You lied to us. You abandoned us. You abandoned me." Things have fallen apart and need mending. Her world has burned. "It's time you let the old wounds heal." AU


**Title:** where I can do no harm

**Rating:** T  
**Spoilers: **general

**Characters**: Seras, Alucard  
**Summary: 'You made a promise to us,to help us find our place. To give us a home. You lied to us. You abandoned us. You abandoned me.'Things have fallen apart and need mending. Her world has changed. 'It's time you let the old wounds heal.' AU**

**Disclaimer: **disclaimed

It's one hundred years later, Jan Valentine notes gleefully one day at breakfast, and there are still no flying cars.

'You owe me half of your life's saving, Police Girl,' he informs her with an infuriating grin, that she kind of wants to slap off of his roguishly handsome face. She's only halfway through screwing her nose up in distaste, when Luke's silky voice glides through the room.

'Jar.'

'I didn't even say anything!' she protests in her delightfully simple British accent.

The fair brother regards her from behind his glowing glasses. Jan clears his throat, stands up, arm on his heart like's reciting the National Anthem, and cites:

'Jeers, leers, cutting remarks and-slash-or passive-aggressive comments, including facial expressions fall under the category of contradicting a simple fact or a truthful statement.'

He has the gall, after that, to smile dashingly, and add 'It's your fucking rules, not mine.'

'Just drop in a euro,' she says, defeated. 'I thought you would've forgotten about this bet already.'

'Us?' Jan asks, shocked, widening his eyes in mock horror, 'Forget? Never.' He flails around with his arms in over-exaggarrated scandalization.

'We're vampires,' says Luke lightly, and taps her temple, 'we never forget.'

It's sad, because it's true.

~x~

She always sends them off, to do whatever they do when they decide she's one female presence too many, and she's alone in their apartment when the hour

(Jan's dubbed it the Witching Hour, but seriously, she asks, 'Isn't that, like, midnight.'

'Whatever, Police Girl, when it comes around you get scary and witchy.' And because he's Jan Valentine, and he doesn't care that some old wounds are still fresh, he just has to add, 'kind of like Integra on her period.')

comes. The sky is kinda quaint, dyed pinkish purple by the sunset, and the looks down at Trastevere and the river from the apartment balcony. The river at this hour, she's dubbed soul-grazing, if she did, in fact, have a soul.

She gazes down at the city lights in the indigo sky until she hears the sound of either Luke or Jan or both of them stumbling up the stairs. With a light tap on the stone railing, she'd silently say goodbye, and see you tomorrow.

'We're out of wine,' she whines at Jan as he enters. 'And Malvina called. She says you're fired. Again.'

The darker vampire is unresponsive, as he wordlessly saunters over to the liquor bar, and pours himself a gracious amount of whiskey. He downs it, looks at their dead fireplace and says

'Fuck.'

'What?' Seras asks. He stands like some stone statue, frozen, his bronze profile illuminated by the fluorescent lamp light, and his piercing gleaming. He eerily reminds her of Alucard, who used to freeze just like that, sometimes, but she decisively pushes the thought away.

'Jan!' She shakes his bony shoulders.

He blinks at her.

'I saw Mina today.'

'Mina? Mina Harker?'

'Do you know any other fucking Minas?'

'You scared me half to death!'

'You're already dead.'

it suddenly downs on her, what those words mean.

'Jan,' she whispers, blue eyes widening, 'Jan… when you saw her… was she –she wasn't – was there someone with her?'

His barely noticeably nod shatters her world in pieces.

~x~  
Seras spends the next four days rolled up like a sushi in her light pink sheets, shivering.

Jan and Luke's attempts to make her go out remain futile. They can't even convince her to eat Insalata di Polo, her favorite dish.

Jan tries to bribe her into going out, shamelessly, with expensive wine bottles, shopping trips with Luke's credit card, and shaking open blood bags from the hospital in front of her face, but she doesn't budge.

Eventually, he lets his brother handle it. Luke has always understood Sears better, for some reason.

'You should come out today,' he tells her softly. 'It's an excellent time for sundresses.'

She groans from the dark warm inside of her emo cocoon.

'You'll lose your job,' he informs her levelly.

'Jan and I can be unemployed together,' she whines.

'Jan's growing an unemployment beard.' And then 'You can't stay inside forever.'

'Watch me,' she snaps defiantly.

'Seras,' Luke says, and gently rests his hand, where her back is supposed to be. 'I saw him today. He walked out of Pope Pius' Pinacoteca. Smug bastard.'

'What did he want?'

'To buy me a drink. I let him.'

'You, you let him?' she emerges from under the blankets, blue eyes flashing a dangerous red, and fangs protruding from between full pink lips. 'Luke Valentine, what is WRONG with you?' she screeches in his face.

'I wanted to see what he wants in Rome.'

'Well,' she snaps impatiently, 'what does he want.'

'To talk. To you.'

'Fat chance,' she says.

'Sears…'

'Don't Seras me, Luke! You know what he did! Hell, you were there! And after all that, he expects to chardash his way back into our lives, and have us grovel at his feet and accept him! NO!'

'He doesn't expect us to grovel, Seras,' Luke says carefully.

'You know just as well as I do that he does, Luke. It's what that man always wants. If you see him again, tell him no.'

he looks at her, as she's turned her back on hi, the angry line of her vertebrae, her small shoulders, lined with tension, and the set of her jaw, which he can only guess.

It's funny how right now she looks like small brittle girl.

~x~

There had been a time, many, many years ago, when vampires were hunted down and killed by two organizations – Iscariot, the Vatican's section Thirteen, and the Hellsing Organization.

Around the last glory days, when the two establishments were at each other's throats more than ever, when Seras was made into a vampire. She did not know who he was, then, her dark, handsome master. It was a secret.

She had just awakened, a confused, lost youngling, when the threat of Millennium emerged, the first wave of their mindless attacks, aimed at Hellsing, and the home which she shared with her master and his master. That's how she first met the Valentine brothers.

They were synthetic, not made from a master's flesh and blood, but rather – from genetic mutations.

She almost killed one, and her master almost killed the other. But psychopath that he was, he changed his mind, a split second decision, and blood-oathed them to himself, much like he had with her, thus gifting them with true immortality.

And for a while, it had all worked fine – the Wild Geese, and the Hellsing Dispatch unit – the vampires, coming together for missions and recreation, until Millennium did its biggest hit, planning to obliterate all of London.

And then, for the first time in centuries, the Vampire Council, an organization presumed dead after the fall of its head, reemerged from the shadows of dark crypts, and abandoned castles, old and new world vampires, secretly united by the handsome, charming, and full of shit younger brother of her master- Radu the Handsome.

The secret fell apart. Seras was a direct descendant of the oldest vampire bloodline in the world.

Millennium fell, eventually, and London was saved. Integra Hellsing, who, to Sears, had been a mother, sister, friend, confidant and master, did not survive to enjoy the triumph of humanity. And with the last Hellsing dead, Alucard, who had never been Alucard in the first place, returned to his former glory of a ruler of all. he went back to his castle on the Poari river, so, so far away from her, all the way across the sea, and he never came back.

Seras, like many others, was left to pick up the pieces.

That had been then, and this was now. London was announced neutral territory. No vampire was permitted stay in the city, believed by many to have been cursed, and no vampire hunter was to pass through it.

The fall of the Hellsings had marked the fall of the war between humans and vampires, a war, which had been brought on by the sick ambitions of a power-hungry mortal who thought he could enslave the Devil's own offsprings. Abraham Van Hellsing's name was spoken as a curse now. It was time for the immortals to return to their previous ways, mingling with humans like they were equals, existing side by side, feeding not for pleasure and revenge, but to feed, seducing, not to kill, but to corrupt.

Sears and the Valentine brothers formed their own little clan, their own little circle. They moved a lot. She wanted to see the world.

A decade there, a moth here, hopping all over Europe and avoiding the Balkans like the plague. For the last year, they had taken up station on Rome, in Trastevere, the quarter across the river. It had been a joke, for them, albeit a bitter one. A play on the old belief that vampires could not cross passing water.

They were, as far as Seras knew, the only vampires in the city, as it usually happened. As soon as the other immortals sensed the essence of the Dracula line in her, they fled. She didn't particularly care. She was fine with just the company of the two bickering siblings, and the Jar that kept their frail peace in place.

And now he was back, the inhuman monster, how dare he?

~x~

London, Hellsing Quarters

The Wild Geese had started a bonfire between their barracks. They were drinking and singing, and roasting marshmallows, and potatoes, and Luke seemed intent on roasting Jan's head under Alucard's amused gaze.

Sears was sat on a cardboard box, her marshmallow in the flames, on the other end of a wooden stick.

'I've never eaten marshmallows before,' she told Pip as he sat next to her.

'Movies make it seem like it's awesome, and stuff,' but they pretty much taste like rubber to me, and it's not because I'm a vampire.'

Pip laughed, a gentle sonorous sound, took her marshmallow off the top of the stick and tossed it in the fire.

'Like this,' he said, as he impaled a new one on the thin wood, and guided her hand towards the flames.

'They may taste like rubber on the inside,' he told her, 'but see,' he brought the stick back up, and with his rough, callused fingers peeled the outermost, burnt layer away, 'inside they're mushy and tasty.'

He let her lick his fingers, and then the stick off of the liquefied marshmallow. Somewhere in the back Luke was cursing obscenely, as his long platinum hair "accidentally" caught on fire.

'You have some marshmallow,' Pip said, brushing her lips, 'here,' he finished as he kissed her, softly, gently, and her small apple white hands moved to wrap around is neck.

It was romantic and sweet and perfect like a movie scene. Alucard scowled deeply, and retreated into the darkness, his red eyes disappearing last.

~x~  
Seras had conceded to return to life. Luke was right. It was sundress time, and she sundressed-up every day. She had taken Jan up on his offer to max out (one of) Luke's credit cards, and had bought herself as much summer clothing as humanly (vampirely?) possible.

Clad in a blue sulk dress with a white sash around the middle, and high-heels open toe shoes, she strolled the streets of Rome, after having bought her groceries. She'd passed through the Barberini tavern, opposite Palazzo Barberini, to buy her favorite red wine.

She descended underground, to catch the metro, when she quite literally walked in him.

He had appeared, as he always did, out of thin air, just as she stepped forth, thought maybe the black dog she'd noticed earlier had something to do with that.

'Sorry,' she apologized, before realizing who she'd walked into.

'It's quite alright,' he assured her, and his fiery eyes burned.

He looked as he always had, though she expected nothing different. He wore a black designer suit with a silk blood red tie, pinned with a golden dragon-shaped pin, and a short coat of black wool, despite that fact that it was midsummer. His eyes burned at her from behind a pair of Ray Ban aviator's sunglasses. There was a silver ring on his left ring finger, with the crest of the Dracula family on it, and his right hand was resting on the iron head of a dragon on top of an ebony cane with a sharp metal ending.

'You,' she said. Her voice came out furious and spiteful, instead of angry.

'Me,' he said smugly, smirking that smirk, which he knew did things to her.

'It's been a long time, eh, Police Girl?'

'Not nearly long enough,' she spat as she gathered her groceries from the ground.

'Have a good day,' she told him harshly and walked past. He didn't try to stop her.

~x~

'The day I willingly give into your flirtations, Pip Bernadette, is the day Luke allows Jan to read his journals!' she said, and everyone laughed as Luke graciously took yet another jab at his habits.

'The day I do that,' Luke said, 'is the day the make flying cars.'

'Oh,' Seras said airily, 'they're well on their way to doing that, you know! I've read reports!'

'Who's your reporter, Fox TV?' Jan snarked. 'I bet you a quarter of my savings that in a hundred years we'll still be wearing out our tires on solid ground.'

'I bet you a half of mine that we'll be flying!' she snapped.

'A century, then?' Alucard's smooth voice glided in.

'A century,' Jan said. 'Write it down, brother dearest: Dear Diary, today Seras, in her infinite blondness, tried to contradict the ever clever Jan, and prove him wrong, though she will of course, fail…''

'Stuff it, Valentine, Seras grumbled.

'Which one?' Jan asked politely.

Pip had withdrawn from the conversation which had no place form him. Flying cars or no, he would never live long enough to see the outcome of this bet.

'You're not good for her, and you know it,' Alucard's materializing didn't scare him as much as it used to, 'You see her now. She'll be like that forever. So will they. You will be wrinkled and sniveling, diaper wearing mess in some decades, and she'll still be, what's the expression you young people use? Smoking hot.'

It was hard to think, that back then, he was already planning his way out of Hellsing's clutches.

~x~

He intercepted her again, as she walked out of her favorite bookstore, armed with light smut novels, and girly magazines that were certain to drive Jan insane to the point where he'd do or say something to get him to put his money in the Jar.

He was leaning on a wall, this time wearing black jeans a fitting black shirt, his sunglasses nowhere in sight.

'I thought I told you,' she began with a deep breath, but he interrupted her.

'Take a chance, Seras. Get to know me.'

'I gave you a chance,' she said softly, 'to let me know you. you turned it down. Go away, Vladislaus, you call yourself that now, don't you?, just go away.'

'It's my christened name,' he said, easily ignoring the rest of her words.

'You made a promise to us,' she told him, gesturing towards herself and vague direction of her apartment where Luke was probably resting in his dark bedroom, and Jan was drinking himself stupid, 'to help us find our place. To give us a home. You lied to us. You abandoned us. You abandoned me.'

He looked down on her, with his smothering dark eyes, his face unreadable.

'It's time you let the old wounds heal,' she told him quietly.

~x~

'He bought me another drink today,' Luke announced as he entered, armed to the teeth with Italian sausage, packages of pasta and seven kinds of cheese.

'And what else? Half the delicacy shop?' Jan asked.

'Jar,' Sears snapped strictly.

'No. the food's for Seras.'

'Well, since we all seem to have fascinating interactions with the local global psychopath, I was dragged into a dark café by his evil female counterpart.'

'Which one?' Sears asked distractedly, as she committed herself to cooking the pasta.

'Mina. You know he only ever travels with her.'

'He's in love with her.' Luke says.

'He's never been in love with her, you both heard him say it,' Sears snapped, almost angrily, and cut the sausage, like she was cutting a person, 'he's incapable of love.'

'Whatever helps you sleep at day, honey,' Jan said.

'Jar!' Luke and Sears barked.

~x~

Seras arrived home from work, to find the box in front of the door, just sitting there, looking at her innocently. It was a big gift box with a light satin ribbon wrapped around it.

She took in inside, sniffed it, shook it, and finally opened it. It contained a long light gray satin gown, with matching jewelry – diamond in white gold – the whole set – earrings, bracelet and choker.

'That high handed son of a-' she exploded.

.

'Just go meet him,' Jan said, 'maybe he'll leave us alone then?'

'No way. I am not going on a fancy date with him in a fancy Italian restaurant in Rome dressed in the dress he's bought me with the jewelry he's given me.'

'Well, just go in jeans and a t-shirt.' Jan offered, 'It's guaranteed to get the message for sure. And before you say anything, I've dropped money in the jar beforehand.'

~x~

She wore her own dress – a no-less fancy strapless black velvet gown, light pink satin shoes, and golden jewelry.

'Didn't you like the dress?' he asked with a raised eyebrow.

'I didn't like the sender,' she told him coldly, and took the offered seat.

'Have you ordered wine?'

'You know I don't drink wine,' he told her, and she almost laughed. Almost.

'Why are you here?' she asked.

'For you of course.'

'I don't want you,' she said, 'you or your faux politeness and civilness, and your smiles, and… I don't want you,' she repeated, her voice small and tired.

'You have all those, the others – you have Mina, and Lucy, and the ones, the three sisters, and… why me? Why now?'

'Why not you? Not now. Always.'

'Quoting Harry Potter won't get you on my good side,' she warned.

'Did you give Jan half your savings?' he asked, changing the topic.

'No, but the garlic that keeps showing up all over the place seems to be some kind of an indication that he's waiting.'

'Childish,' he tells her, 'Petty.'

'That's how I've always been. Isn't that why you left?'

'I left because I was tired.'

'And now I am asking you to leave because I am tired! For God's sake, Vladislaus, can't you see it? I am tired of your serpentine lies and your high-handedness, and your petty cruelty, and your constant presence, I am tired of your control freak tendencies, I am tired of you!' she was yelling at that point, having gotten up from her seat, and screaming in his face, while the stunned waiter had discreetly moved back.

'You're making a scene,' he told her quietly.

'I know, and I don't care! I need to get the point across to you! You do not own me anymore! I am not yours! I'm not your fledgling, I'm not your police girl, I'm not your assistant! You left me! And now I am asking you to do it again,' she had calmed down, by then, and she left, he heels clicking angrily on the floor, as he was left staring at her angry back retreat.

~x~

'That's it!' she snapped loudly, upon entrance. 'We're leaving Rome! Pack your stuff, wrap the jar, and off to the Caribbean, everyone!'

she clapped her hands to indicate her impatience.

'Not that we can't afford it,' Luke said carefully, 'But why the Caribbean?'

'It's sunny. He hates sun.'

'Yeah well, he hates the Vatican too, but he's here, isn't he?' Jan piped in.

'Jar!' Seras practically screeched.

'No jar,' Luke argued, 'He's right.'

'So what are we gonna do?' Sears asked desperately.

'Nothing, Seras. We'll stay here. Continue our lives. Italy is a beautiful country with delicious pasta. Why would you want to leave? If you want a change of scenery, we could go to another city? How about Venice?'

~x~

'I'm leaving England for good, Police Girl,' he tells her gruffly. The secret, his secret, is out. His lips are still stained with Integra's blood, the side of his face splattered crimson, and his left arm coated in blood, after he'd ripped the heart out of her chest. She looks at him, and for the first time she feel nothing. No fright, or awe, or even love, nothing but disgust. He is a monster, the worst kind of monster.

'I'm glad,' she says shakily.

~x~

'Venice depresses me,' Jan mutters gloomily, from the balcony of their new apartment, overlooking one of the busiest channels.

'Go die in a hole,' Seras snaps. She's been in a foul mood ever since her meeting with Dracula, but at least there' hasn't been any indication that he's stalked them all the way here, for which she is glad.

~x~  
'How dare you?' she howls, throwing herself at him, beating at his rock hard chest with her small fists, how dare you, how dare you, how dare you?'

He doesn't do anything, just remains like an outworldly beautiful statue, as she hits him over and over again. Tears, angry, red and bloody, are streaming down her round cheeks.

'You lied to us!' She shrieks, 'You let all of us down! You MONSTER! You betrayed us! While we were getting killed… you did nothing! They were murdering us! And you… YOU JUST STOOD THERE!' Her frantic violence has been calmed, to harsh sobs, racking her frame, but she has enough fight left in her to spit out the last words, and leave him, in the midst of the carnage, and his empty triumph.

~x~

With cold vengeance Seras drenches Jan's sheets and pillow in holy water, and leaves them to dry out in the sun. He so had it coming, for stealing all the clothes in her wardrobe and selling them on eBay. Her sundresses!

Luke was right. All she needed was a change of scenery. There's nothing wrong with Italy.

~x~

Alucard, who is not Alucard anymore, sighs, and lazily twirls the dead rose between his long graceful fingers.

'You saw it coming, didn't you?' his female companion asked.

'I did, of course, but I had hoped that she would…'

'She's not like us, Vlad,' Mina said gently. 'She doesn't see you like we did.'

'She was much stronger than any of you ever were,' he says, almost spitefully, in a vain attempt to hurt her.

'You killed her lover.'

'The French pig was not her lover. And even if he was? So what? I killed your lover too, if I remember.'

'Jonathan was a weak-willed pathetic little man,' she said. 'But you know that already.'

He sighed, and dropped the rose.

'Until we meet again, then, Police Girl,' he spoke into the night.


End file.
